In color photographic paper used for direct viewing, usually used is the combination of a yellow coupler, a magenta coupler and a cyan coupler. Among these, recently developed as the magenta coupler are pyrazoloazole type couplers.
The pyrazoloazole type couplers, being different from 5-pyrazolone type magenta couplers conventionally used, are characterized by being fundamentally advantageous to the color reproducibility because the dye formed therefrom has no side absorption around 430 nm. They, however, generally have a longer maximum absorption wavelength as compared with the 5-pyrazolone type magenta couplers, and therefore disadvantageous in that the absorption at the longer side of 600 nm or more is not sharply reduced to zero.
The magenta couplers obtained from the pyrazoloazole type magenta couplers are also known to have image storage instability, in particular, light-resistance that is inferior to the magenta coupler obtained from the 5-pyrazolone type magenta couplers, raising a great problem when they are put into practical use. Still also, the pyrazoloazole type magenta couplers have color-forming properties inferior to the 5-pyrazolone type magenta couplers, resulting in a lower maximum density of the magenta dye images to be obtained, disadvantageously.
As stated above, in actual state of things, there have not been discovered any light-sensitive silver halide photographic materials having excellent properties for all of the color reproducibility, image storage stability and color-forming properties of the magenta dye images.